Student Intern
The lounge at the Caribou Inn and Convention Center was a very crowded place to be on Friday night. It was difficult to move around the room without bumping into someone and getting swept up in a conversation, or looking through old photo albums.
Crowds are pretty typical at bars on the weekends, but members of this crowd were a little different. Many of them weren’t all from the Aroostook County area. Some were from as far away as San Francisco, California. You may be wondering why were they at a hotel lounge in Caribou, Maine?
This crowd was made up of the Loring Ramprats, a group of men and women who all used to live and work on the former Loring Air Force Base, ranging from when the base first opened to it’s closing in the mid 1990s.
Curtis Swift, member of the Ramprats, said that the reunions started off with about three of them, after fellow member, Mike Allison, told his friends about a Website, where they could all share photos and stories. The Website provided the Ramprats a way to stay in touch with each other and find out what had happened in each other’s lives since they last met.
Website membership is by invitation only and only for Loring personnel, Swift explained. Anyone interested in joining the RampRats must contact one of the four administrators on the site to ask for an invitation to the group. He also said that they will also allow children of former personnel into the group, so that they can connect with their parent’s history. Swift said the Website can be found by going to the Loring website, where there is a link to the Ramprats site.
Swift said that once the Website was started “it absolutely exploded.” He said “we had six members after a week, and through the white pages and the Internet, we had 300 members after a year.”
Swift said that over 100 members showed up for the first reunion, held in the area in 2002. A second reunion in 2004 drew a smaller crowd, and a small reunion was held in Las Vegas for those living on the West Coast. Approximately 40-50 members were at the lounge Friday night, but that didn’t include members that were staying elsewhere or hadn’t arrived in the area yet.
Many of the Ramprats hadn’t been to the area in decades, and they were very excited to be back. George Tyman, who was an Airman Second Class, while at Loring, said the last time he was here was 44 years ago.
Gary Jones, Airman Third Class, who now resides in Charleston, S. C., said that he and his wife had their first home on the base.
Col. (ret.) Garth Wright was on the base from 1964-68 and won a the Air Force Cross medal, which, according to members present at the lounge, is one step lower than receiving a Purple Heart.
When speaking about the medal, Wright said, “A lot of people should have had medals. I have one that I wear for everybody.”
Wright shared a few funny stories and memories, including the time that the whole base was trying to get ready for a visit from former U.S. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith. The base commander said that Smith wanted to have three things in the morning to go with her breakfast: a flower, a copy of the Boston Globe and blueberry honey.
Wright said, “I don’t know where the flower or the Boston Globe came from, but I know how the honey got there.”
Wright explained that blueberry honey was difficult to find in the middle of winter, so once some was located, State Police troopers relayed the honey up to the base.
Wright then recalled the night a rather inebriated civilian dressed in a Santa Claus suit, burst through a gate on a snowmobile. The civilian had made a bet with someone that he could get on the base and get back out without getting caught. Wright and a fellow officer agreed that they never would have caught him if he hadn’t crashed his snowmobile.
All the RampRat members who were present were all focused on the same things: reliving old memories and getting caught up with what had been happening in everyone’s lives. Some members brought in old picture albums with photos that had been taken on the base, and many of those present flipped through them, laughing at their old pictures and marveling at how much things had changed.
Wright commented that “the faces are a bit more weathered, but underneath they haven’t changed.”
Some members had the chance to look around the old base before going to the hotel that evening, and they couldn’t believe how much things had changed. One officer commented that the area where he lived was gone.
“People who weren’t there at the time look at it and see nothing,” he said. “Those of us who were there can look at it and see everything.”
The Ramprats had a weekend full of events. Following their Friday night get-together at the hotel lounge, they went to the Loring Heritage Center on Saturday to attend a barbecue being held at the center. On Saturday night they had a dinner at the Presque Isle Inn and Convention Center, and on Sunday they had an organized tour of the Wildlife Refuge located on the base, where there used to be a weapons storage area, according to members.
After the weekend events were over, the “rats” began to leave the area, going back to their own homes, located all over the country. However, they said they were eager to come back for the next reunion.